TEVIS, Walter (Stone)

(1928-1984)

   US writer, professor of English literature at the University of Ohio, who perhaps remains best known as the author of The Hustler (1959), filmed in 1961, and its sequel, The Color of Money (1984), filmedin 1986. He began publishing sf with "The Ifth of Oofth" for Gal in 1957 as Walter S. Tevis - his early work, and the tales he wrote around 1980, are assembled as Far from Home (coll 1981) - but he first came to wide notice as an sf writer with The Man who Fell to Earth (1963), the basis of Nicolas Roeg's film The MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). It is the delicatelycrafted story of an ALIEN who comes to Earth from Anthea in an attempt to arrange asylum for his dying race; in return, he will pass on the benefits of Anthean science. Becoming as physically and emotionally human as his technology and his powers of empathy permit, he finds the xenophobic bureaucracy of humanity's response to him, when he reveals himself and his quest, impossible to bear; and the blinding he suffers fairly represents the dying of any hope he might have had of making sense of us. WT's subsequent novels were less darkly inspired. Mockingbird (1980) rather mechanically runs its ANDROID protagonist through a process of self-realization in a senescent USA 500 years hence. The Steps of the Sun (1983) is the story of an impotent tycoon who revivifies himself andperhaps the entire world by finding a sentient, motherly and cornucopian planet on his first space flight and bringing her gifts back home; too often the plot fades away into psychodrama. WT himself said that his work was autobiographical. His early death perhaps kept him from telling a whole story.

   JC

   See also: ROBOTS.